Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A • S U M M E R 2 0 1 7 48 W I L D W E S T W OR DS W I L D W E S T W OR DS with CHRYSTI THE WORDSMITH D E PA R T M E N T H E R I TA G E GEYSER e world's most famous and viewer-friendly geyser is arguably Yellowstone National Park's Old Faithful. Named for its relatively predictable eruptions, Old Faith- ful rockets a column of steam and boiling water 100- plus feet in the air approximately every ninety minutes. Old Faithful has at least three hundred companion geysers in the Yellowstone area. All these dramatic eruptions are caused by volcanically heated, subter- ranean water shooting upward through rock chan- nels in a kind of underground pressure valve. Other such geothermal features are sprinkled around the world in New Zealand, Chile, Iceland, and Siberia. All are generically referenced as geysers, no matter where they're found. What's the story behind this term? It comes ultimately from Old Norse, the language of the Vikings and their sagas. When Norse sailors began settling the island of Iceland in the 800s, they found a land of active geothermal and volcanic features. One was an impressive fountain that periodically shot a column of boiling water 200 feet high. e settlers called it Gey- sir, meaning, roughly, "the gusher," from an Old Norse verb geysa, "to gush." It was the first of such fea- tures described in a printed source and the first known to Europeans. Borrowing the word in the late 1700s, English speakers turned it into geyser. is Norse-based term now refers generically to all spouting hot springs. RAVEN e words chickadee, killdeer and whippoorwill derive from human attempts to verbally imitate bird calls. e world over, birds are named for the sounds they make: there's the chachalaca in Central and South America; the hoopoe throughout Eurasia and Africa; and the kookaburra laughs from its perches in Australia. e word raven, at first blush, doesn't appear to be a part of this onomatopoetic avian party. To our ears, the common raven, ubiquitous throughout the northern hemi- sphere, makes sounds that we describe as caws and croaks. But if we listen with the sensibility of some of our early linguistic predecessors, another sound emerges. e modern word raven comes from the Old English hraefen, which is the way those speakers imitated the bird's gutteral vocal patterns. In Old Norse, the bird's name was hrafn, which amounted to a Viking onomatopoea. Over the centuries, the initial h-sound diminished, and the bird became a raven in modern English. Its scientific name, corvus corax, reflects the common Greek term for the bird, korax, the croaker. Just as humans fabricate words to copy the sounds ra- vens make, ravens can be taught to imitate human speech. Charles Dickens' pet raven named Grip had an impressive English vocabulary. Not so Edgar Allen Poe's bird, whose command of the language was restricted to the single ominous word nevermore. STEVE AKRE

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